The latest in Ivan Hewett’s 50-part series on short works by the world’s
greatest composers

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To find Gustav Mahler in a series devoted to short classics may come as a surprise. This is, after all, the man who patented the monster symphony. The first movement of his Third Symphony alone is longer than Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and any one of his nine completed symphonies can fill an entire concert.

In fact Mahler was just as suited to a small canvas. Like Wagner, he’s a master of the exquisite moment, the sharp pang of nostalgia or otherworldly bliss, caught and held. The thing about these “spots of time”, as Wordsworth called them, is that they don’t belong to the normal temporal dimensions of music. They’re either very small or very large, which is why Romantic music more and more tended towards the miniature and the gigantic.

In Mahler’s symphonies, these luminous moments tend towards the latter. Think of those offstage horns and cowbells in the symphonies, pinioned over trembling strings. They linger on the air, endlessly, and they come round again, and again.

It’s a different story with the songs. Mahler’s earliest works were songs for piano and voice, and some of these worked their way into his great early song sets for voice and orchestra. In the songs, those spots of time to me have a keener edge, because we hear them only once.

When Mahler turned to writing symphonies, the songs he’d already composed formed their emotional kernel. Whole books have been written about how the songs of the Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) and Mahler’s settings of the collection of German folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn work their way into his first four symphonies.

This heart-stopping song is a late addition to that collection, composed in 1901 when Mahler was 41. It’s a wonderful example of a form Mahler made his own: the funeral march, turned into art. He had great models to work from, in the funeral marches of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata. But unlike those, this one has a bitter edge of realism. Mahler was raised in a garrison town in Bohemia, and his pungent orchestration in this song has the smell of the parade ground.

LISTENING POINTS:

00.00 A hollow drum roll introduces the first line: “Ich armer Tamboursg’sell..." (“I am a poor drummer-boy, they’re leading me from my cell. If I had stayed a drummer, they would not be imprisoned now.”)

00.52 The second verse follows a similar pattern, but wound up in tension and in key centre, as the drummer boy looks up at the gallows and realises it’s for him.

1.34 The music returns to its dull trudge for the third verse, more neutral in tone: “The soldiers march by... they ask who I was. I was a drummer from the first company.” There’s a flash of pride at this declaration, at 1.57, but grim awareness of his plight returns almost immediately.

2.23 A drum roll introduces a new, resigned note, marked first by a solemn melody in the cor anglais. It’s a deeply moving moment, which will remind Mahler devotees of the Fifth Symphony.

3.00 “Good night, marble rocks, mountains, hills,” sings the boy. Listen to the way the vocal melody at 3.14, on the words “Good night officers, corporals and grenadiers,” is echoed sadly in the cor anglais at 3.18.

3.29 A move to the major key, a surprise which makes perfect emotional sense – particularly when the minor mode returns at 3.40. This back and forth between major and minor continues through the boy’s defiant, desperate farewell. “I cry with a loud voice, and take my leave of you. Good night, good night!”

FURTHER LISTENING

Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt

Another song from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn set, this one imagines St. Antony of Padua preaching to the fish. “His words are immediately translated into their thoroughly tipsy-sounding language,” explained the composer, referring to the squawking high clarinet (no one brought out the clarinet’s potential for shrill parody as well as Mahler). “They all come swimming up to him... I swear while I was composing I really kept imagining I saw them sticking their stiff, immovable necks out from the water, and gazing up at St Anthony with their stupid faces... not one of them is an iota the wiser for it. But only a few people will understand my satire on mankind.”

Symphony No 2 – Scherzo

Mahler transformed that modest little song about St Anthony into the mighty Scherzo of the Second Symphony. “It’s a strange process!” said Mahler, when asked how he did it. “Without knowing at first where it’s leading, you find yourself pushed further and further beyond the bounds of the original form.”

The first striking difference is the massive kettledrum stroke that launches things, which tells us we’re in for something big. At around 3.25 the music starts to move away from the song, but the really striking moment comes at 4.42, where the music breaks through to some heavenly realm the song never dreamed of.

Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen

My favourite Mahler song, which is hardly an original opinion, as many think it’s his greatest. It comes from a set of five called the Rückert-Lieder, as they’re based on texts by the little-known poet Friedrich Rückert. Mahler takes a very average little poem about the joys of being alone in a dream, “lost to the world” (as the title says), and makes something so powerful, because so understated – not something you can always say about Mahler. As he said about this song, “It is a feeling that surges right up to the lips, but does not go beyond them. And that is precisely me.”

The performance here from Janet Baker, with the New Philharmonia conducted by Sir John Barbirolli, is as close to perfection as anyone could hope for.